With such significant changes across the board, performance jumps up throughout all three System Guide boxes. Performance benefits are huge in some areas, modest in others, purely cost-saving in still others. Power consumption is further refined in this generation, particularly with video cards, and additional improvements in power supply efficiency never hurts.

From old to new

New/updated CPU architectures from Intel (Ivy Bridge) and AMD (Piledriver) grace the System Guide. Updated graphics card architectures from Nvidia (Kepler) and AMD (Southern Islands) improve both performance and power consumption. Smaller, cheaper flash memory now exists (newer, smaller 20nm NAND, vs. older 25nm and 34nm NAND). And Xeons based on Sandy Bridge-E/EN/EP are included here as opposed to the older Gulftown/Westmere-EP chips.

Other articles cover these changes in-depth, particularly in areas such as CPU microarchitecture and graphics card design. Flash memory and solid state drives now occupy entire sections on major tech websites, with pages and pages written about flash controllers, performance, reliability, and all sort of other things.

We'll focus more on the tangible benefits for the System Guide: better overall performance and performance for your dollar (aka value), while trying to stay within the average enthusiast's budget for a new system.

System Guide Basics

The main Ars System Guide is a three-system affair, with the traditional Budget Box, Hot Rod, and God Box addressing three different price points in the market from modest to a little crazy. The main System Guide's boxes are general-purpose systems with a strong gaming focus, which results in fairly well-rounded boxes suitable for most enthusiast use or as a solid starting point to spin off into a variety of configurations.

Previous Ars system guides

The low end of the scale, the Budget Box, is still a capable gaming machine despite its reasonable price tag ($600-$800). A capable discrete video card gives it reasonable punch for gaming, while sufficient CPU power and memory ensure it's good for everything else. The Hot Rod represents what we think is a reasonable higher-end general-purpose computer that packs plenty of gaming performance. We've adjusted the price tag a few times recently, from $1400-1600 down to $1200-1400... and now, perhaps back up to the old point to reflect new capabilities and jumps in performance. The God Box remains a showcase or a starting point for workstation builders or enthusiasts who believe in overkill with a capital "O." It may not do exactly what you want, but it should be an excellent starting point for anyone with a good idea of their truly high-end computing needs—be it gaming to excess after winning the lottery, taking advantage of GPU computing, or storing and editing tons of HD video.

The short take would be: the Budget Box is for those who are seeking the most bang for their buck. The Hot Rod is for enthusiasts with a larger budget, but who still know that there's a sweet spot between performance and price. The God Box, as excessive as it is, always has a slight dose of moderation (mentioned in previous guides as "God wouldn't be a glutton").

Each box is set up with a full set of recommendations, down to mouse, keyboard, and speakers. As these are general-purpose boxes, we skip things like game controllers and $100 gaming mice, although the God Box does get something a bit nicer. We also discuss alternative configurations and upgrades.

But today's guide reflects the appearance of affordable SSDs and the recent spike in hard disk prices, the video card battle between AMD and Nvidia, and the plethora of monitor choices if you have a little more money to spend.

As a side note, we do address other systems in our occasional Specialty System Guides. Green computing, more gaming-focused setups at slightly different price points, an even lower-cost office/"mom" box known as the Ultimate Budget Box, HTPCs, and others. A particularly large gap exists between the Hot Rod and God Box, which is filled by the occasional Gaming Boxes. If you don't see anything that interests you here, please feel free to check them out.

The big changes

Big changes since the last update seem to fit into three major areas: new GPUs, new CPUs, and cheaper SSDs.

The last few generations of video cards have brought fairly significant gains and occasionally lower power consumption. AMD's Southern Islands GPU family, represented by the Radeon HD 7700/7800/7900-series cards, and Nvidia's Kepler GPU in the GTX 600-series all bring performance improvements over their older counterparts. Recent releases of the lower-end Kepler GPUs have given some much-needed competition in the Budget Box and slightly above, too, forcing price cuts from AMD to match.

Intel's new Ivy Bridge CPUs bring better performance and lower power consumption at similar price-points to the older Sandy Bridge chips. Extreme overclockers dealing with Intel's new 22nm manufacturing process may prefer to stick to Sandy Bridge (on Intel's more mature 32nm process), while the budget-priced dual-core Ivy Bridge chips have yet to come out.

AMD remains less competitive than some would hope, with their latest Piledriver update looking good but not good enough to beat Ivy Bridge at higher price points. Piledriver makes an appearance in AMD's low-cost Trinity APU, though, where it looks much more competitive. It should make for an interesting Budget Box.

As a significant note for the God Box, Intel has finally updated their Xeons to the Sandy Bridge-E processors, a very welcome if somewhat belated update.

Finally, SSDs (solid-state drives) continue to get cheaper and cheaper, cracking the $1/GB barrier and even the $0.85/GB barrier with regularity. Even getting down to $0.50/GB after rebate is happening for patient shoppers. This kind of storage performance improvement is a rare thing, and at this price, an SSD is a serious consideration for every box in the main System Guide.

I'm using that Asus monitor in the Budget Box build list. I've been extremely happy with it, especially the color quality for a cheap LCD. I haven't had it hardware calibrated but I've managed to eyeball decent RGB settings that let me pick out off-white patches in other people's digital art that they've missed in Photoshop. It's really just a beautiful screen for the money. The internal speakers are of course tinny, but they're there if you need them. By way of comparison, I recently bought an Acer S231HL as an external monitor for my laptop and Raspberry Pi, and I loathe it. The colors are washed out and bluish even on the warmest preset, and there's no way to fine-tune the RGB values from the monitor itself, only from the included software. Which doesn't work on Linux (even under WINE). If you do get stuck with it, though, there's an ICC color profile you can download here after first adjusting it according to these directions.

Too bad that EVGA board is too big for the Coolermaster Cosmos II. That's a beast of a case and fitting of the "God Box" moniker. I have a HAF X as my main build and it's such a cool case I'm gonna make a change to it pretty soon. Might even treat myself for Xmas.

WRT the Seagate spinny drives in the Hot Rod -- stick to the 2TB recommendation.

There is a Seagate 3TB drive out there that's receiving some heavy discounts in holiday sales... don't be tempted by these. I ordered 4 of these drives from various places to catch BF/CM deals... because moar. Two of them were bad in the box (one was DOA the other had SMART errors from the first spin-up), and there's a rash of people reporting DOAs with these on NewEgg.

I would like to know how quiet that Seasonic G series really is. I've been looking for a new PSU and really want quiet but without spending over $100 for something fanless. I was considering a Rosewill Capstone 450W but maybe this would better? About the same price.

Also, why is a 5.1 setup downplayed so much for a "hot rod" that will probably be used for gaming? Surround sound adds a lot to most types of games. Who cares if it isn't as high quality as a high end 2.1, the rear speakers and large sub are adding more. You can use headphones when you want to appreciate some music.

The God box should have a pair E5-2687W's in it. They're 200 Mhz faster than the E5-2690's as well as cheaper. The catch is that the E5-2687W's are 150W parts where as the E5-2690's are rated for 135W. That eVGA motherboard can easily handle the 150W parts so umm... why not go for the faster and cheaper chips?

I'd also like to point out that a triple display setup for the God Box would be fitting. AMD's Eyefinity or nVidia's Surround Visions are things that the God Box should boast.

daropi wrote:

Actually I just built a gaming rig last week and while I used several of the same parts, you can find MUCH better deals.

If you're near a microcenter in US, they have intel CPUs like the 3570k for ~$170, plus a -$40 discount if you purchase any z77 motherboard with it. That's a huge savings over the ones listed here.

I'll second Microcenter. Got a 3930K for $400 in store a week ago for my build. PIcked it up on a Wednesday and got the black Friday deal nearly a week earlier. They ran out of 3820's for socket 2011 and offered me the black Friday deal to compensate. A bit more than I wanted to spend but I got a slightly higher clock speed and two more cores.

Also picked up a Gigabyte X79S-UP5 for the SAS ports for usage as a DIY storage box. The only downside is that the SAS ports don't support RAID5 or 6 (at least that I've found). For those looking at a single socket 2011 build, I'd give this board a recommendation thus far.

One word to the wise, though; according to Bethesda they don't support Skyrim running any higher than 1920x1080 and will do nothing to help me resolve the fucked up first person view I'm experiencing in 2560x1440.

At least Far Cry 3 works flawlessly.

Also, it kills me that people act like owning/liking machines like an iPad and building your own gaming PC are mutually exclusive and nobody could possibly do both. I've been building my own hardware since the 386 days and I also happen to own a Retina MacBook Pro which is totally unserviceable. OH NOES!! How can it be? I must be crazy, right?!

Depending on what you're looking to spend on audio and how much space you have, you can do quite well hooking up a cheap T-amp to some passive speakers.

Admittedly, I won't be (anywhere near) the most knowledgeable person here, but I don't think you could get a better computer audio setup for the price:Lepai LP-2020A amp ($20)Pioneer FS-51 speakers (get as low as $100 with coupon at Newegg, though they're discontinued and might never come back in stock)Alternate 5A power supply (~$10)Speaker wire (variable; Monoprice is the way to go for good cheap wire)

One word to the wise, though; according to Bethesda they don't support Skyrim running any higher than 1920x1080 and will do nothing to help me resolve the fucked up first person view I'm experiencing in 2560x1440. !

I just got the same monitor and am also extremely happy with it. Oddly though, my main use of it so far has been Skyrim, running at 2560x1440, and I haven't noticed any problems at all.

Just a note, the link to the case/psu on the budget box doesn't work. Plus half the prices are already out of date (I get that the point is that it's a guide, but auto-updated pricing would be nice).

Also, the PSU in that case is the Antec Earthwatts 380W (the article says the not so great Antec 380W, then suggests the Earthwatts, kind of confusing ) But it's probably worth adding a note that if someone is thinking about the budget box plus a higher end GPU, they should really consider going for a good 500W PSU. While the 380 should run it, I probably wouldn't trust it personally

Also isn't it about time that the God Box had some sort of PCI-E SSD storage? An OCZ 480gb or 960gb revo drive is well within the God Box price range and gives double the transfer of a sata 6gbs SSD. 1.5gb/sec is something that God wouldn't sneeze at

I think the 7970 is overall faster than the GTX680 according to the latest benchmarks.

If you take a look at this article over at Tech Report, you might want to stay away from the AMD cards.

I have a 7970, and noticed the same problem in Skyrim - the game was almost unplayable. I have no problems in BF3 or other games. To fix the problem in Skyrim, I first tried changing the graphics settings, v-sync, etc. but no luck. Eventually, the only thing which fixed it was to limit the FPS to 59 (using dxtory), and it seems to work well now.

If you are an audiophile on a 'budget', I'd recommend an entry level amplifier with 2nd hand good quality home theatre speaker sets. My Onkyo TX-SR308 plus my 5.1 Canton speaker set costs only $500 in total, sounding better than any PC oriented speaker and soundcard combo on market. I link my HDMI input from my Readeon GPU, doing so I get loseless 5 channel audio through a digital pathway, the DAC is handled by my amplifier.

Still no mITX boxes? Get on with the times - most people building nowadays use their PC as part of the entertainment setup so consider things like noise etc.A better distinction could be a small box, a silent box and a server box perhaps?I'd considered sth similar to the god box for a while and all those extra cores would be idle most of the time.In the end my primary work machine is an 11" macbook air hooked to a 27" LCD and the PC is mostly just for entertainment and comfort.Also with Windows 8 already widely available, have you considered a system that would accommodate for the touch interface somehow?I know it's not as simple as budget vs hot rod vs god box, but frankly if someone wants that simplicity they should probably consider buying rather than building their own.

isn't it about time that the God Box had some sort of PCI-E SSD storage? An OCZ 480gb or 960gb revo drive is well within the God Box price range and gives double the transfer of a sata 6gbs SSD. 1.5gb/sec is something that God wouldn't sneeze at

I wonder about this myself (though I've heard enough bad reviews of the OCZ Revo series to make me hesitant to use that particular brand). If the real-world performance comes anywhere close to the theoretical limits of PCIe vs SATA III, one would think that opting for the higher speeds in such a high-spec dream machine is a no-brainer.

Granted, PCIe SSDs look to be almost 3x the price per GB as SATA, but that only amounts to a few hundred dollars on a >$15k machine.